Annual Dinner

This year's WSS Annual Dinner is at the La Tasca Spanish Tapas Bar & Restaurant in Washington, DC (Metro: Gallery Place station, Chinatown exit), Thursday, June 18, 2009. The Gertrude Cox Award winner is Dr. Jean Opsomer from Colorado State University. Dr Opsomer will speak at the dinner about sampling design. The price for the dinner is $40 person.

The 17th Federal Forecasters Conference (FFC/2009)

Thursday, September 24, 2009
Washington, DC

The conference theme is "Forecasting and Risk." The conference seeks to highlight how forecasters account for low-probability, but high-cost events. Participants will review how forecasters account for the following risks: economic risk, energy supply risk, food supply risk, health care and epidemic risk, transportation disruptions, and natural disasters. The conference will examine the role of federal forecasters in the evolution of public policies that account for these rare events. For more information, visit www.federalforecasters.org or contact Jeff Busse, 12201 Sunrise Valley Drive, MS988, Reston, VA 20192; (703)648-4914; jbusse@usgs.gov

The Caucus forWomen in Statistics will host a breakfast on Monday, August 3 from 6:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. at the Embassy Suites at 900 10th St NW (located between I and K Streets) in Washington, DC. The breakfast is open to both members and non-members of the Caucus. You may come to the breakfast even if you are not attending the Joint Statistical Meetings. There will be the traditional roundtables with specific topics for discussion, as well as other tables with no specific topics of discussion. The meal will be the full breakfast buffet offered at Embassy Suites hotels.

Topics for the discussion roundtables (as of May 1) will be

Work/Life Balance

Negotiating Salary and Other Job Benefits

Comparison of Statisticians' Jobs Across Different Settings

Legal Rights and Wrongs in the Workplace

Additional roundtables may be added at a later date.

Cost is:

Members--$13.00

Non-Members--$15.00

Full-time Students--$8.00

To reserve a place at the breakfast, email Anna Nevius at nevius@comcast.net by July 22, 2009.

Workshop on How to Do Nonresponse Bias Analyses
in Household and Establishment Surveys

June 10, 2009

The Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology (FCSM) is sponsoring a one-day workshop designed to help Federal agencies meet the OMB guidance for conducting nonresponse bias analyses when surveys achieve response rates less than 80 percent. The workshop will feature illustrative examples of the research done by Federal agencies and their contractors to examine nonresponse bias in Federal surveys. The workshop is intended to provide a forum for agencies to learn and share experiences in conducting nonresponse bias analyses, with emphasis on the methodology, and each session will include time for floor discussion. A variety of techniques will be illustrated on different surveys, including Federal surveys of individuals, households, business establishments, farms, and educational institutions.

Research presented will include the examination of potential nonresponse bias by:

Using data obtained from the survey frame or panel,

Using data from response history,

Benchmarking to external data and administrative records,

Examining additional information obtained from a subsample of nonrespondents, and

Evaluating different nonresponse weighting procedures.

In addition, some research will also be presented that compares two or more of these techniques and approaches to investigating potential nonresponse bias.

The workshop is targeted to:

Individuals in Federal agencies who manage and conduct surveys;

Federal statisticians, survey methodologists, and others who design, conduct, and evaluate surveys; and

Individuals in universities, business and nonprofit organizations who are involved in the development, implementation or evaluation of Federal government surveys.

The workshop will assume a working knowledge of data collection methods in survey research. Examples will be presented and only rudimentary statistical knowledge of concepts such as bias and variance of estimates is required of participants.

Students' Corner

The end of the academic year has come. For many of us, that means summer vacation and a chanceto recuperate from a busy year. For others, it's time for uninterrupted research, studying, and internships.

SIGSTAT Topics

GeoDa is the latest incarnation in a long line of software tools developed by Dr. Luc Anselin's Spatial Analysis Laboratory (SAL) in the Department of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It is designed to implement techniques for exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) on lattice data (points and polygons). The free program provides a user friendly and graphical interface to methods of descriptive spatial data analysis, such as spatial autocorrelation statistics, as well as basic spatial regression functionality. The latest version contains several new features such as a cartogram, a refined map movie, parallel coordinate plot, 3D visualization, conditional plots (and maps) and spatial regression.